Audible will continue its spring programming with the New York premiere of Faith Salie’s Approval Junkie. Developed in collaboration with and directed by Amanda Watkins, the monologue play will run March 17–April 19.
In Approval Junkie, comedian and Emmy-winning contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning shares her personal story of a lifetime spent looking for validation in all the wrong places. As with all Audible productions, the show will be recorded live and made available as an audio production on the platform at a later date.
“There are those brave artists who create art for art’s sake, who generously share their voices with no need for applause. I am obviously not one of those,” says Salie. “I’m thrilled and honored to bring Approval Junkie to Audible Theatre, to ask nakedly for applause and laughter, and to bring to its vast audience these stories which are mostly inappropriate for my children to hear.”
“I’ve been a Faith Salie fan for many years,” adds Kate Navin, the artistic producer of Audible Theater. “It’s a privilege to be able to bring her laugh-out-loud humor and wit to Audible’s members and live audiences at the Minetta Lane.”
Approval Junkie joins the upcoming productions of Dan Rather’s ‘Stories of a Lifetime,’ which will play the Minetta Lane February 18 and 19; In Love and Struggle, which will bring together women of color for monologues, music, comedy, and tributes (February 28–March 1); and a limited run of Liza Jessie Peterson’s acclaimed solo Peculiar Patriot (March 5–7). Read more here.
Roundabout Theatre Company opened the Off-Broadway premiere of new musical Darling Grenadine as part of its Underground programming February 10. Written by Daniel Zaitchik, the bittersweet Manhattan story follows charismatic songwriter Harry and his relationships with Louise, his brother Paul, and his beloved dog.
Darling Grenadine began January 16 in the Black Box Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, where it is scheduled to run through March 15.
The creative team for Darling Grenadine at Roundabout includes set designer Tim Mackabee, costume designer Emily Rebholz, lighting designer Lap Chi Chu, sound designer Brian Ronan, projection designer Edward T Morris, music director David Gardos, orchestrator Matthew Moisey, and animal trainer William Berloni.
Roundabout Underground debuts its first new musical in a decade. When charismatic songwriter Harry falls for clever chorus girl Louise, all of Manhattan glitters with the blush of new love. But what happens when the sparkling fantasy begins to dissolve Bubbling over with charm, wit, and whimsy, Darling Grenadine navigates the tension between romance and reality, light and dark, bitter and sweet. Featuring a vibrantly eclectic score and stirring book and lyrics by Daniel Zaitchik.
A glance at Nnamdi Asomugha’s Wikipedia page immediately reveals he’s not like other actors. He didn’t grow up doing the school play or working on tech crew or earn his BFA or even realize an affinity for acting until he was in his 30s. Asomugha hadn’t tried theatre because he was focused on something else entirely: football.
Born in Lafayette, Louisiana, but raised in Los Angeles, Asomugha was a natural athlete—and not just casually. After graduating UC Berkeley, where he played for the California Golden Bears, he was drafted in the first round of the 2003 NFL draft to the Oakland Raiders. In his 11-year football career (with the Raiders, the Philadelphia Eagles, and the San Francisco 49ers), he was a star cornerback—voted All-Pro four times, a three-year team captain, and the highest paid defensive back in NFL history. He retired in 2013 (the same year he married actor-producer Kerry Washington); but it was actually football that first got him into the acting game.
Nnamdi Asomugha Joseph Marzullo/WENN
Doing commercial work, “and having directors and different people saying, ‘You’re very gifted at this; I know it’s just a Nike commercial but this is something that you should really look forward to doing when you’re done’ really encouraged me,” Asomugha tells Playbill. Suddenly, Asomugha had an idea of one thing he might like to try when he finished with football “because you have no clue what you’re going to do when you finish playing football, so you try a bunch of things, and I knew that this could be one of them.”
Yet, Hollywood came knocking before that. Peter Beg, who had directed him in a Nike commercial, offered him a guest role as a police officer on Friday Night Lights in 2009—at the height of his NFL career. He fell in love with it.
Soon after, he performed in a staged reading of a John Patrick Shanley play at Circle in the Square; he wrote and starred in a short film, Double Negative. While it seemed Asomugha would follow the Tinsel—producing Beasts of No Nation, producing and starring in Crown Heights—theatre called to him.
“With theatre, it’s life for me,” he says. “You’re breathing the same air as the audience. You hit go and you can’t stop until it’s all over. There are no mistakes because it’s just real life. If you drop your brush, you’ve gotta go pick it up. There’s no calling cut, which I love.”
Ngozi Anyanwu and Nnamdi Asomugha Carol Rosegg
He made his Off-Broadway debut with a lauded performance in last season’s Good Grief at the Vineyard Theatre, and on January 21, he made his onstage Broadway debut in Roundabout Theatre Company’s A Soldier’s Play, where his team mentality has proved crucial in his stoic, yet provocative performance as First Class Melvin Peterson (one of seven Black men questioned by visiting military police officer Captain Richard Davenport about the murder of his troupe’s Sergeant, Vernon C. Waters Charles Fuller’s now Pulitzer Prize-winning play).
“I found him through a lot of help and good coaching from [director] Kenny [Leon] and the other guys in the company,” he says. “They’ve helped shape the character just as much as I have. They’ve been doing plays their whole lives so if they find something that I can tweak that focuses me more into the character then they let me know.” But Asomugha underplays the value and perspective he brings to the role.
As part of a story that highlights the variation within the Black experience, Peterson prefers to call Hollywood (rather than his native Alabama) home. He is a thinker, highly educated, outspoken, respected by his peers in the black battalion at Fort Neal—despite his temper. Asomugha balances the facets of this complex, fully developed man. “The goal was to bring as much warmth to him as possible,” says Asomugha. “He’s very revolutionary and can come across as telling people what to do. But he’s kind of a warm guy, he wants everyone to get along.”
A born leader—and former NFL team captain—Asomugha wields a quiet power onstage. He knows when to catch the light and when to lend an assist. His strategic mind comes into play as he probes Peterson’s philosophical approach to bettering the race as a whole.
“I think the interesting thing is how similar Peterson and Waters are and that they both want the best for their race. They just go about it two different ways,” he notes. “Who’s the good guy who’s the bad guy? By the end of the play they’re kind of in the same boat.”
As the murder mystery of A Soldier’s Play unfolds, Asomugha does well to take the drama moment by moment—as he does in life. His Broadway opening took place during the Sundance Film Festival, where Sylvie’s Love, a film produced and starred in opposite Tessa Thompson, premiered. But his focus never left the building. Asomugha is the kind of person and the kind of actor who doesn’t get ahead of himself.
“The most important thing to do when you go out onstage,” he says, “is to not know what happens next.”
Theatre fans need not travel all the way to New York City to get a taste of Broadway. Though the Big Apple boasts perhaps the freshest productions and greatest talents in the world, many of the most successful shows on Broadway will eventually hit the road- bringing and equally magical though sometimes slightly updated version of their production to cities across the country.
In recent years, the theatre industry has prioritized sustainability—whether that’s through SCENERY’s upcycling of show curtains into handbags and show deck into jewelry, or the Broadway Green Alliance’s e-waste collections and textile drives. But TDF (the organization that brings you TKTS and so much more) has been way ahead of the curve thanks to its Costume Collection, which opened in 1974.
Now housed at Kaufman-Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, the TDF Costume Collection Rental Program is a stories-high warehouse full of costume donations from Broadway productions, touring companies, regional houses, and more, that rents out its 85,000-piece inventory to any organization working in theatre, film, dance, TV (or other artistic endeavor) at any level. Everyone from Saturday Night Live to a high school in Kentucky rents from the massive collection. Thanks to their work, approximately 44,000 pounds of materials were saved from landfills last year alone—not to mention the fabulously dressed productions that resulted.
Racks upon racks of clothing fill the massive warehouse, with some aisles stacked four racks high. Divided first by time period, then by article of clothing, and often by color, the TDF Costume Collection boasts pieces from the Bernadette PetersGypsy, Bob Mackie’s studio, the Metropolitan Opera, Jelly’s Last Jam, The Boy From Oz, Orange Is the New Black, The Little Mermaid, and hundreds more.
TDF Costume Collection Special Stock Courtesy of TDF
“We have a number of wardrobe people on Broadway and a number of producers who think of us all the time,” says Stephen Cabral, a full-time staffer since 1994 and the director of the Costume Collection since 2008. “When the show’s in previews [and costume changes happen] or when a show closes, certain producers give us pieces or all of the show’s costumes.”
The Collection clothes approximately 1,000 productions per year, renting about 10,000 costumes across 38 states. TDF’s Collection also serves as a living archive of costume design; Cabral displays the most singular pieces—like an original Elphaba Act 2 gown from Wicked and Pearl Bailey’s Hello, Dolly! dress—in the Collection’s Education and Research Center. Akin to a TDF museum, the Collection is an evolving record of design.
Billy Porter’s upcycled Celestino Couture gown for the 2019 Tony Awards Courtesy of TDF
What You Can Rent Cabral and his staff separate the Collection into regular stock and special stock; the latter includes high-end items like an original gown from Anastasia, Renaissance garb from Something Rotten! on Broadway, and the clothes from the 2016 She Loves Me revival. Still, clients typically frequent regular stock. “Our two biggest sections that get rented all the time are 18th century—so anything that looks like Marie Antoinette—or generic 19th century—so it would work for The Importance of Being Earnest or it might work for The Cherry Orchard,” says Cabral.
But clothing from every period and aesthetic stuffs the racks in Queens. Mamma Mia! disco jumpsuits? Check. The Little Mermaid spandex? Check. Leopard print jackets, luxurious furs, hand-beaded flapper dresses? Check, check, check.
From extravagant to practical, the Collection can be a resource for many productions—but not all. “We’re dependent on donations not only to keep stock [generally] full, but also to do certain shows,” says Cabral. “Up until maybe 10 years ago, we couldn’t really do Gypsy. We didn’t have the cow; we didn’t have the strippers.” And then, the dry cleaner for Bernadette Peters’ Gypsy didn’t want to store the archive anymore and, soon after, Mackie donated his made-for-TV repertoire. Suddenly, Gypsy was on the menu.
Bob Mackie with some of the costumes he donated to TDF Courtesy of TDF
How to Rent Many people can rent from the Collection in person or by mail order. Rental fees are “per costume,” which is one head-to-toe look—and customers get creative. If you dress one person with a hat, gloves, shoes, a top, a jacket, and a skirt, “we don’t go to the theatre to check to make sure one actor is wearing all of that,” says Cabral. “Maybe I’m wearing the jacket and skirt in one scene and someone else is wearing the hat, the gloves, and the shoes.”
A full regular-stock costume costs $130 for a one-week rental, but non-profit rates (which may cover public schools, colleges, universities, non-profit private schools, religious groups, etc.) begin at $50 for a one-week rental, plus a dry cleaning fee. Rental rates depend on: non-profit status, length of the rental, and audience capacity. (More pricing info here.)
But the expertise TDF offers is invaluable. “A lot of people walk in here without a costume degree, so they’re going to ask for what they think [the period] is and we interpret,” says Cabral. “They would probably say, ‘I’m looking for Victorian,’ and they have an idea in their head of what that looks like. To me, Victorian makes no sense because Queen Victoria reigned for 60 years and fashion changed so much—but it’s all in our aisles.”
Anyone can make an appointment to visit the Collection, explore the racks, and rent on site. Be sure to bring your actors or their full measurements. “People are expecting it to be like a department store where everything is going to be tagged [with its size],” says Cabral, but that’s not the case. You can try things on a dress form, or there are two fitting rooms for actors that must be booked in advance.
Even with full measurements, TDF recognizes costumes may not fit perfectly and exchanges are always possible. Minor alterations are acceptable, but there is no gluing, cutting, painting, dying, or use of stage blood on any costumes.
For those less experienced in costume design, a staff designer can help pull costumes for a minimal additional fee. Think of it as the Collection’s version of personal shopping.
Though not everyone can make it to Queens, TDF will not allow that to deter renters. Last year, 15 percent of rentals filed via mail order. In this case, clients either submit “your design” by completing a costume plot form to demonstrate the vision, or elect “our design” where the staff chooses the best looks for the title. Mail orders incur labor fees: 25 percent of the total rental for “your design” and 30 percent of the total rental for “our design.” But for educational programs and theatre across the country, the professional touch is worth it.
TDF Costume Collection racks Courtesy of TDF
How to Buy Twice a year, the Collection hosts a “Bag Sale” in which customers can RSVP, walk in, choose a $20-size bag or a $50-size bag, and fill it up with as many clearance items as they can. These are items in the Collection that have become too worn or distressed to rent, or if no one has rented them in a long time or are donated pieces that don’t fit into the selection.
“For us, it’s a way of getting rid of things; we’re not going to throw them in the landfill, we’re green,” says Cabral. “For some of these people, this is how they are able to produce theatre.”
TDF Costume Collection accessories Courtesy of TDF
Custom Costumes TDF’s Collection is an unparalleled operation—the only of its kind. Its success depends on the niche knowledge Cabral and the expert staff in the warehouse possess.
“Nothing here is in a catalog,” he says. “You really have to have a good sense of fashion or costume history because you really need to be able to look at something and go, ‘That’s 1860s, that’s 1910,’ because that’s how it goes back into stock.”
Just as Broadway costume designers tell stories and build characters through clothing, so too does the TDF staff—but with the added challenge of relying solely on their stock. Their work makes authentic theatre, film, and television possible at every level of performance.
“We’re a cross between a car rental dealership and a library,” Cabral compares, “while also being this repository for the history of costume design and, sometimes, the history of Broadway.” It’s a tall order, but luckily they have the space to handle it.
For more information about the Costume Collection, to make an appointment, or to place an order, click here.
